GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2015

TARDIS SN

License: New and Simplified BSD licenses

Web Page: https://github.com/tardis-sn/tardis/wiki/GSoC-2015-ideas-Page-for-TARDIS-SN

Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tardis-sn-dev

TARDIS is a tool that creates synthetic observations (spectra) for exploding stars (supernovae).

A supernova marks the brilliant death throes of a star, during which it outshines its entire galaxy. It not only marks death, though: supernova ejecta change the evolution of the Universe and enable the formation of planets and life as we know it. From the iron in your blood to the gold in your jewellery, supernovae return heavy elements assembled from the primordial hydrogen and helium left after the big bang.

TARDIS provides a link between theory and observations, by creating synthetic spectra from theoretical assumptions and allowing to compare them to observations.

We, the community around TARDIS, are interested in combining astronomy,  computer science, statistics and modern software design in building a tool that is both useful in research and teaching alike (with a documentation that would in theory allow anyone to recreate it from scratch).

 

Projects

  • Implementation of new features into the new Tardis plasma module framework. I would like the chance to work on the restructuring of the Tardis plasma module. I have used Tardis in the past for my own research, and I have added new physics to the plasma module for my own purposes. I am therefore quite familiar with how Tardis works and with the plasma module in particular. If I were given the chance to work on the new plasma module framework, I would be able to add my own alterations, which have proved very successful, into the distributed version of Tardis.
  • TARDIS-SN Fitting Multiple Supernova Spectra at Once The goal of the project is to rewrite and/or extend the DALEK part of the TARDIS ecosystem to be able to take several spectra for optimization. The spectra would reflect the evolution of the supernova in time and would provide the fitter with more information to make an accurate fit than a single spectrum.